Hiring Practices to Build a Diverse Team at Wakr Forest Engineering: Transforming Engineering Education and Broadening Participation in Engineering is Possible!
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive case study of Wake Forest Engineering's successful launch and transformation to build a diverse faculty team to support innovation across curriculum, pedagogy, research, and community impact.By implementing research-grounded hiring practices focused on minimizing bias and promoting inclusion, the department achieved remarkable diversity metrics: 50% women faculty, 25% racial/ethnic diversity, and representation from over 12 engineering disciplines including educational researchers, social scientists, and humanists.These faculty demographics catalyzed student body diversity (40% women, 25% racial/ethnic diversity) and elevated the program to become the highest-ranked academic unit at Wake Forest University.The paper details over eighteen evidence-based and research-grounded hiring strategies across key phases of the hiring process (position ad, recruitment, screening, interviewing, onboarding, continuous improvement) to support the building of a diverse faculty team.This collective set of strategies present a tested model of hiring practices that can be leveraged by other engineering programs and other higher education departments seeking to transform their faculty recruitment processes and build more inclusive academic environments that better serve an increasingly diverse student population.These strategies can benefit not only new departments but also existing ones.Recruiting, hiring, and developing diverse faculty teams is possible and essential to supporting a diverse student population.There is urgency in this work for the betterment of higher education and engineering education. Recruitment, Screening, and Interview Phases:• Regular bias training (Gino and Coffman, 2021;Applebaum, 2019) • Broad recruitment across historically excluded groups (Cosgriff-Hernandez et al., 2022) • Structured interviews (Levashina et al. 2014;Williamson et al., 1997) • Blind resume screening (Derous and Ryan 2019)• Standardized evaluation criteria (Isaac et al., 2009;Reilly and Chao, 1982) • Multiple evaluators (Fine et al., 2014;Isaac et al., 2009) • Cross-functional teams (Homan et al.,
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--54097
Author: Olga Pierrakos
Institution: Wake Forest University
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W4409294976